Not normally, in fact I have never heard that phrase used in English conversation. You could use it in this context: ""hello", together with, "mate" are common greetings in English".

I heard it here: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...5/#post4236807

That may be a translation error - "hello all" is correct, "hello together" isn't.

This phrase:- "How could he do that" seems to have a few meanings. Note the emphasis:-

"How could HE do that" infers he lacks the ability

"How COULD he do that" infers a lack of morality

"HOW could he do that" Asks about the method

And there are probably a few more; all showing the difficulty of written expression (in English) compared to face to face.

I think that this difficulty has been mentioned before on this thread, although I cannot find it and cannot remember if there was any advice given.

Hi Anisha - your observations are as usual very to the point and relevant. I would like like to hear your thoughts (among others) on the above.

My previous paragraph is convoluted - yet I don't know how to fix it? Anybody?

Because you had capitalized the particular words, I found it easier to understand the emphasis shown in those sentences. It is really necessary to capitalize certain words sometimes, it saves a lot of extra statements and smilies.

I remember an incident that happened a few days back in my office. The Romanian guy I talked about previously in this thread wrote a mail to one of our ex seniors (currently in Australia) asking him whether the code written by him was inspired from somewhere to which the senior replied "NO!, I've written the code from scratch". The capitalization of the word "NO" lead the Romanian guy to believe that the senior was "shouting" and was "egoistic"!

Hmm? I see what your saying but I would probably er - he was certainly putting emphasis on "NO!" (capitals and an exclamation mark) I can understand the Romanian guy taking it that way. How else would one take it? The Australian guy was at the least, being defensive, but probably not egotistic.
Is that correct?

It all depends on how well a person is educated w.r.t the net etiquettes. And ignorance is bliss Many people in our office are not aware of existence of forums and mailing lists so they do not know what impact a capital lettered word/sentence has!

I wonder how will that Romanian guy react if I ever tell him Kindly do me a favor..., LOL

Maybe, you should use more cheap words and then be able to communicate with the salt of the earth... ! LOL

Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savor, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men.

Salt is necessary for life for flavour This old English quote (16th century) seems to be saying that without salt we are good for nothing - we don't even taste good?

But perhaps I'm misreading you Hugh. I should just be honest and say - I don't get it?

Oh! now I've read the thread properly - I follow

Just as a historical note: salt, at one time, was a very valuable commodity. To have salt was to have money; literally. And so we have the sayings "worth his salt", " salt of the earth" and so on.

Interesting -and I guess, not casually-, the word salary comes from the Latin word "sal" (salt); but I guess now we're jumping from English to Latin

Shouldn't matter; there is lots of Latin in English anyway.

The "salt of the earth" comes from the Book of the apostle Matthew - so your right about old. Matthew takes us back to the 1st century

Often the salt of the earth type is my kind of person,they are the least of men,hard working decent and will always help you in your day of trouble,their language is often really common and filled with expletives but I would rather be with them than a fine spoken liar who will cheat you every chance they get. LOL

Learning politcally correct English will isolate you from the mainstream and ultimately lead you into isolation,the reason I said language is dynamic can be shown by this example...not far from where I live there is a place called Ruislip,now around the 1930,s it was pronounced Rooslip,its now pronounced Righslip,I can produce many examples of this and some are quite extreme,my guess is that this is probably true for every language. !

ps Anisha,your English is probably better than mine... LOL

But I think for a non native English speaker it is much more important to get the basics right first, e.g. I never knew that advise and advice are verb and noun respectively..(thanks to sycamorex). Learning and getting into some non standard pronunciations/words etc would lead me nowhere ATM, IMHO.

I am happy to hear that from a native English speaker! But that is not true in the case of spoken English, even when sometimes I used to speak in English (just for fun and practice) with my friends, I was called a smart ass (which is quite understandable)